Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/889023
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST OCTOBER 2017 VISUAL EFFECTS would traditionally do in previs." According to DiGiordana, "The ulti- mate goal with previs is always to help save time and money, and to help the di- rector realize his vision. Here, the biggest challenges were coming up with a lot of the visuals and trying to establish the overall look of something while also sci- entifically trying to make sense of it. The nice thing is, we had a science advisor on the show, Andre [Bormanis], who is also one of the producers, and he was always available to answer any questions. For instance, if we wanted to establish, "What does this worm hole look like?" or "What does this plasma look like?" he was basi- cally able to sit down and work with us. I think just the biggest achievement was feeling the sense of worth that the previs brought to everything. We're here to help the directors realize their vision, and if we can basically provide that, we're doing our job." VISUAL EFFECTS High-end visual effects for television is not a new concept for LA's FuseFX, known for its work on such TV hits as Marvel: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., American Horror Story, Scorpion, The Blacklist and Zoo. At the time Post spoke with the studio's VFX supervisor Tommy Tran, FuseFX had already completed 73 visual effects shots for The Orville, with more on the way. One of the key sequences was the pilot episode's opening. "We were the main vendor on the pilot and we started early this past summer, with just talks, getting proof of concept and artwork out to them and building that relationship," says Tran. "Our main contribution to the pilot was the opening scene, where we established New York, 400 years from now. It was a lot of CG, a lot of in-depth matte paintings with hundreds and hundreds of buildings. We had to make it all up, based on this vision that Seth had, where everything was clean and pristine. Every balcony had its own lush garden and there was no more poverty. Everything was perfect. Once they figured out all the problems on Earth, they went to go save the universe. We had to use our imaginations to figure out what Seth wanted with this perfect world. We went through a bunch of revisions on our concept of New York 400 years from now and we wanted to keep main, iconic buildings there, but updated. For instance, there was one shot where they wanted to use the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge is still there, but we added a monorail to the bottom of it and futuristic paneling to the sides. If you look at it, at first glance, it's the bridge. But then, if you pay closer attention, you realize it's been updated for a future world." According to Tran, the first five minutes of the pilot was all FuseFX's work, as well as a scene early on in the episode and an- other at the end where conversations take place inside the admiral's office. There, FuseFX completed a detailed, digital matte painting for the environment seen outside of the admiral's window. "It wasn't anything groundbreaking," explains Tran. "It was a digital matte painting, but it was also very intricate that was brought to life with the help of CG ships and CG pods — lots of air traffic. It's just a flat, two-dimensional painting of a million buildings — or 600 of whatever we ended up with. Then we added small nuances, such as moving water, clouds, little ships, little taxis, little transports here and there just to draw the eye to some sort of movement that made our matte painting come alive." To complete the look of a futuristic New York City, FuseFX relied on a mix of tools, including Foundry's Nuke as its main compositing software, Adobe Photoshop for the matte paintings and Autodesk 3ds Max for the 3D — modeling all the ships, the pods and some of the buildings. "The matte painters all use Adobe Photoshop, and then we use Max for our 3D. We did use CG buildings in our matte paintings. The artists built some very nice looking buildings — some intricacies that we just couldn't paint. We created a lot of really cool buildings and then we gave that asset out of Max to our Photoshop guys, our matte painting department, and they laid those CG buildings into our matte paintings. I guess we call it 2 ½D, where we integrated 3D buildings, very cool articulate ones that had a lot of di- mension to them, to make everything pop a little bit better." According to Tran, "We went down to Fox early on and they had all their sto- ryboards, all their artwork and concepts of each ship, figured out pretty well already. They had been in pre-produc- tion for about a year at that point. So, all their uniforms, all their cities, ships, were on the wall as concept art through- out their office. We immediately felt like we knew where they wanted to go with the world and then it basically came down to maybe three or four concept images that someone had done on their end and a rough layout of New York City. Through those we said, 'We get it — there's a mix of iconic buildings here and there and the rest is this very shiny, clean, green world. We just ran with it and I think we submitted maybe two versions of our concept and they loved our second version. They let us loose for a month — while we did the main matte paintings for it —everything after that was smooth sailing." On a personal note, Tran says a lot of the team "geeked out" when they found out they were working on a Seth MacFarland and Fox project. "When we get a show like The Orville where we're going into space, we're going into the future, we geeked out pretty hard on that," he says. "When you have a name like Seth attached, you really want to go above and beyond. It's been a lot of long hours, but also a lot of fun. Seth knows what he wants, and I am very happy to be able to give it to him." Some outstanding digital matte painting work was completed by FuseFX. Halon was tasked early on to help establish the movement of the ship.